Saturday, April 30, 2016

Staunton, April 30 – As Sofya
Mokhova points out in a Rosbalt commentary, Russian officials have come up with
a variety of excuses to deny Russians their constitutional right to peaceably
assemble.Some of them may be rational;
others are clearly not; and some especially in the case of occupied Crimea are “exotic.”

But this year, the coincidence of
May Day and Easter has opened the way for Russian officials to deploy not only
all their usual justifications for preventing those the regime doesn’t like
from marching or meeting but also a new one: marches and meetings, they say,
could prevent Russians from attending Orthodox services.

Mokhorova writes that the proclivity
of Russian officials to find “ever more means of refusing to agree to protest
actions” suggests that the country is proceeding along the path toward a police
state” in which only pro-government marches and meetings will be tolerated (rosbalt.ru/piter/2016/04/26/1510097.html).

Among
the methods the authorities use in refusing to give permission to opposition
groups are scheduling pro-government activities at the same time and place,
claiming that a given place is being repaired, suggesting that the group will
violate laws on promoting this or that banned idea, and pointing to mistakes in
applications.

Sometimes
the excuses reach truly amazing heights, Mokhrova says. In Barnaul, officials
refused to allow a demonstration that planned to use dolls to make its point.
They said only people could do that.And
in occupied Crimea, the Russian authorities have pointed to the risk of the spread
of African swine flu in denying marches.

But
this year, Russian officials are using the coincidence of May Day and Easter to
refuse to give permission for demonstrations almost certainly because they fear
that these events could lead to serious protests but ostensibly because they
want to ensure that all Russians who want to attend Orthodox Easter services
will be able to (rosbalt.ru/federal/2016/04/27/1510452.html).

Rosbalt
journalist Dmitry Remizov says that officials in numerous regions have invoked
Easter services as a reason not to allow May Day demonstrations, thus making
them “’more holy than the pope’” given that the Moscow Patriarchate’s press
service has said that it doesn’t see a problem with celebrating both on the
same day.

Vadim
Abdurrakhmanov, a KPRF leader in the Khanty-Mansiisk AO, says that Easter
services are just an excuse. In fact, he argues, “the powers that be are afraid
because they know what the economic and political situation in the country is.”
People want to protest and May Day is a traditional occasion to do so.

Andrey
Korablyev, a member of the Union of the Militant Godless in Tyumen, is even
blunter: officials will use anything including Easter to prevent people from
meeting and marching.No May Day
demonstrations will prevent Russians who want to from going to church given
that the former last only a half an hour or so and the others go on all day.

Anna
Ochkina, head of the Moscow IGSO Center for Social Analysis, says that the way
the authorities are using Easter as an excuse is “very strange” because most of
the people who attend May Day demonstrations don’t go to church and vice versa,
although it is possible that the authorities really don’t understand.

They
probably think, she says, that “the Russian people are entirely part of the church”
and that May Day demonstrations would interfere with their attendance. But if
they do, Ochkina concludes, this only shows “once again” that “the authorities
do not know the people which they are trying to govern.”

Staunton, April 30 – Having threatened
Stockholm with unspecified military responses if Sweden joins NATO, Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says in an interview with “Dagens Nyheter” that
Russia’s “Christian culture” makes it impossible for Moscow to continue to
pursue “business as usual” with the West.

And the West’s “everything is permitted” approach
“contradicts the fundamental bases of our culture, which is based on the
Orthodox religion, on Christianity,” Lavrov continues.

In other comments, he says, Russia will
depend on itself alone, something that “thanks to God, the Lord and our
ancestors,” his country has sufficient resources to be self-sufficient.It will no longer depend on purchases abroad,
an approach that Lavrov is Russia’s “strategic course.”

He insists that “this does not mean
isolation, and when ‘Western partners’ decide to return to normal behavior” –
presumably a reference to an end of sanctions, “this will give additional
chances for growth and the development of cooperation … but on all essential
things, we will now depend only on ourselves.”

Staunton, April 30 – Neither Russian
officials in Moscow nor the Russian embassy in Dushanbe have reacted to the
latest efforts by Tajikistan to de-Russianize that country, although as Andrey
Serenko points out, if Ukraine were doing the same thing, there would be
widespread expressions of Russian outrage.

In part, this is a reflection of
“the cynical quality of the double standards of Russian policy in the
post-Soviet space,” the political analyst writes on the Fergana portal, with
Moscow always keeping track of the removal of Lenin statues in Ukraine but
ignoring far more radical de-Sovietization and de-Russification elsewhere (fergananews.com/articles/8956).

But
in part, it reflects something a much larger development: Moscow’s loss of
influence over the media in Central Asia, a loss that has occurred because
Russian officials have proved incapable of working effectively with journalists
there and thus have conceded defeat without much of a fight, according to the Regnum
news agency (regnum.ru/news/polit/2126337.html).

Serenko
notes that the Tajiks took down the last memorial to Lenin in their country
already eight years ago and that last December they dismantled the
24-meter-high monument to Soviet power. If Ukraine had done this, the Russian
media which have accused Kyiv of fascism, but “in the case with Tajikistan,
there has been the silence of the grave.”

Nor
was there any Russian official reaction to the renaming of streets in the
Tajikistan capital, to the elimination of all Russian-language signs and
memorials, to the reduction of the number of hours of Russian language in the
schools, to the requirement that Tajiks use their national language in contacts
with officials, and to de-Russianizing their names.

This
last step and the absence of Russian reaction is especially troubling, Serenko
says, because it means that ethnic Russians like the Ivanovs, Petrovs or
Sidorovs who are Tajikistan citizens must either give up their Russian names or
become “de facto second class people
orthographically.”

“The
pragmatism of Russian policy in the near abroad, which is built on corrupt ties
and personal accords with narrow ruling groups and which ignores real work with
public opinion in the republics of the former USSR has already led to its
collapse in Ukraine,” Serenko says. If Moscow continues this approach, it is
going to lose its influence elsewhere as well.

In
an article on the Regnum news portal, Yevgeny Kim quotes Mikhail Petrushkov,
the former representative of Central Asia in the World Coordinating Council of
Russian Compatriots says this reflects the inability or unwillingness of
Russian officials in the embassies in Central Asia to work with the media in
order to ensure that Russian themes reach a broad audience.

According
to Petrushkov, who lives in Tajikistan, the Russian embassy in Dushanbe has
been anything but helpful to the local Russian community there and at the same
time doesn’t take kindly to any criticism of its shortcomings which have
contributed to Russia’s “surrender of positions” to anti-Russian and
pro-Western outlets since 1991.

“In
Tajikistan now,” he continues, “there is not a single pro-Russian media outlet
which gives the audience Moscow’s positions.”And even those that sometimes publish pro-Moscow information also carry
things like interviews with the Ukrainian ambassador who is anything but polite
about Russia.

This
has consequences for Russia’s standing in Tajikistan, Petrushkov says. The
older generation still has warm feelings for Russia and Russians, but the
younger one “already does not see Russia as a friend.”More needs to be done with television – there
is only one Russian channel – and with the Internet.

And
it has to be careful about how it presents things. When Russians talk about the
advantages of Eurasian integration, they also need to point up “the minuses” involved
because “the worst thing of all is when expectations are raised and later are
proved to be false,” Petrushkov continues.